How drunk would you say you had to be in order to deserve to be raped? No, let's be a bit more precise. How drunk would you have to be before society was 75% less sorry that you'd been raped? The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) reduced by a quarter a payout to a rape victim, having deemed her one quarter too drunk at the time of the offence to deserve the full amount.

Strangely, the CICA didn't appear to have decided on a policy, with regards to rape victims, until it was quizzed by the media. First thing on Monday, it issued some fuzzy musings on how it adjudicated "conduct issues in good faith, based on the facts available to them". Later that same day, justice minister Bridget Prentice about-faced to: "I can be clear that it is not our policy to reduce the level of the award to a victim of rape due to alcohol consumption."

Today, the Ministry of Justice is adamant that its policy has always been thus, and this was one unfortunate mistake. I pointed out that it happened to 14 rape victims in the past year. "This was a mistake in their interpretation of the guidelines." Ah. That still counts as one mistake, apparently. Furthermore, this particular victim's solicitor, Debaleena Dasgupta, had to contest the original payout on grounds of indirect sexual discrimination, since she was unable to get out of the organisation what the guidelines were in the first place.

I was being rhetorical before; I hope that we all agree that there isn't enough booze in the world to make a woman deserve to be raped. There is still debate to be had, though, about whether justice as a whole is shaken up by this notion of an inebriant being de facto partly responsible for his or her own downfall.

With the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, we're talking about crimes against the person - the tariff is worked out by the body part, that is, on the basis of injuries, not on the basis of the crime committed against you. Naturally, a drunk person might be considered to have "contributed to the circumstances of their injury" if they were involved in a fight and came off the worse because of pugilistic incompetence; but it would be rare for a case like that to even come before the CICA. The nitty gritty of who started it, with what manner of belligerence, will already have been dealt with by the Crown Prosecution Service, so where the CICA's discretion enters the frame, it is more circumstantial - did your conduct, as a result of drink, make you more likely to get into that situation?

It is unarguable that drink makes an idiot out of you - that the more you drink, the more of an idiot you become; that statistics from accident and emergency departments for drink-related accidents are climbing steadily; that a sober person is safer, both outdoors and in. But you have to ask what standards the CICA condones when it modifies a person's right to go about unmolested, in the light of the condition they're in.

If it lessens the award because the victim had made him or herself vulnerable, does it follow that CICA sees vulnerability as an invitation to a criminal? Is it tacitly saying, when it accepts that a drunk contributed to their own mugging, that an old or physically incapable person makes the same contribution? Is it averring, when it decides that someone provoked a fight with a drunken manner, for instance, that drunkenness and violence are morally equivalent, that this all comes under a hoodlum umbrella, and it's just a matter of degree? Bearing in mind that you don't get a payout for a trivial injury like a black eye, it has to be something pretty serious. I do not agree with that. I do not concede any of these assumptions.

One of the fundamental problems with our attitude to alcohol in this country is that respectable temperance is wrongly assumed to be the majority position, so everyone thinks himself the rebel. In fact, the sober are the true rebels of this culture, and the sooner we admit that, the more open we'll become and the faster we can reach a meaningful position on everything relating to alcohol, from criminal responsibility through the NHS burden to governmental nannying.

But even if you disagree, even if you think compensation payouts should reflect the fecklessness of the victim, are you happy with the CICA making this call? It is supposedly answerable to the Ministry of Justice and yet it doesn't agree with it on (or "correctly interpret") such matters as fundamental as rape. It treated 14 rape victims in one year abominably. It is unaccountable, untransparent and tergiversating. Surely the first case to answer is: who is it to call us drunk?